CRM – Page 42 – Nishant Rana's Weblog

Power BI with Dynamics 365 CE – Showing Power BI Dashboard / Tile inside Dynamics 365 CE

In the previous post, we created a simple report and published it to the web and used IFrame to display them in Dynamics 365 CE.

https://nishantrana.me/2018/08/20/power-bi-with-dynamics-365-ce-publishing-power-bi-report-to-the-web/

Now let us create a Power BI
Dashboard using that report, which we will then display inside Dynamics 365 CE as a proper native Dynamics 365 CE’s Power BI Dashboard.

Let us take the fastest route to create them, back in Power BI Service, hover over the chart in the report and select the option “Pin Visual”

We will be presented with the option of creating a new dashboard or add to an existing one.

Here we have created a dashboard named “My Dynamics 365 Dashboard”

Similarly, we can pin or add the other chart in our Report to this Dashboard.

Apart from pinning the chart from the report into the Dashboard we also have the option to configure the Phone View for the Dashboard by clicking on Create phone view.

Phone view lets us specify how the report should look within the mobile device by dragging the reports in the designer surface.

This is how our Dashboard looks now inside Power BI service.

Now suppose we want to share this Dashboard with other users and also want to display this Dashboard inside Dynamics 365 CE, for this, we need to Share them.

However, as soon as we click on Share button we would get the below message.

To share and collaborate we need to have Power BI Pro license.

With Power BI Pro license, we can share it the with other users in the organization having the Power BI Pro License and also use the Reports \ Dashboard within Dynamics 365 CE.

Click on Try Pro for free and Start Trial which assigns the user 60-day free trial

After successfully assigning the license click on Share and select the user to grant access to.

Here we have selected user2 here.

If you remember from the previous posts, the Dashboards and Reports reside inside My Workspace.

Alternatively, we create a workspace and add the members (user 2 in our case) to it with edit access.

Note: We can publish the report that we created earlier from Power BI Desktop to this new app workspace.

While creating the new workspace we can also define the Access to it for the other users.

Here we have already assigned Dynamics 365 CE Enterprise Edition Plan and Power BI free license to User 2.

User 2 can see the report in Shared with me section inside Power BI service.

As we had mentioned earlier, when the user2 tries to open the report he is prompted with the message that Power BI Pro license is required to see the reports shared,

Click on Try Pro for free to start the trial for the User 2.

After successful activation user will be able to see the report inside Power BI Service. Here we are done with Sharing and assigning license part, now let us display it within our Dynamics 365.

Before we can do so we need to enable Power BI Visualization Embedding inside Dynamics 365 CE.

Navigate to Settings à Administration à System Settings and enable Power BI integration.

Open CRM, and select New to create a new Personal Dashboard and select Power BI Dashboard

It will load the all the Workspaces and the corresponding Dashboard inside it to which the user has access to.

Enable for mobile will make the dashboard available on Dynamics 365 for Tablets and Phones.

Select the Dashboard and click Save.

The Dashboard inside Dynamics 365 à

Similarly, User 2 can create a personal Power BI Dashboard inside Dynamics 365 CE and select the dashboard that is shared.

Apart from adding the Dashboard, we can also add the Power BI Tile to the Dashboard.

Create a new Dynamics 365 Dashboard, click on add a Power BI tile option to add the tile as shown below.

The CRM Dashboard showing Power BI tile à

This completes the sharing and displaying the power bi dashboard and reports part inside Dynamics 365 CE, next we will cover how the data can be refreshed so that users are looking at the most up to date data possible.

Hope it helps..

Power BI with Dynamics 365 CE – Creating Power BI Report

To begin with, let us first create a Dynamics 365 Trial.

https://trials.dynamics.com/

After our CRM trial is setup up successfully, we will install the OOB Sample Data which we would be using for creating the Power BI report.

Next, we need to create a free trial for the above user to use Power BI Service.

Go to Power BI site, and click on Start Free to get started.

Use the same user account (trial) that was used to set up the Dynamics 365 trial.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us

Note: If we already have an organization account with Power BI License we can use it to log in to Power BI else can associate a free trial to the same organization account instead of creating a new one. The gmail, hotmail, yahoo etc personal account are not allowed. https://app.powerbi.com/.

Download the Power BI Desktop as well as click on Try Free.

Power BI Desktop is basically a feature rich windows application that allows us to get data from various services online or on-premise and develop Dashboard and Reports efficiently.

The alternate way to download is through Microsoft Downloads siteà

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=45331

After installing it and signing in and click on Get Data ribbon button to connect to the Dynamics CRM Online.

Select Dynamics 365 Online as the Online Services to connect to.

Specify the Web API URL of the instance.

Copy it from Customization à Developer Resources

Select the Organization Account and Sign in to the CRM Instance.

In the Navigator window, we have searched Lead entity and clicked on Edit to select the columns that we need for our sample report.

In the Query Editor window, click on “Choose Columns“, we have selected the Revenue, Created On, Subject and Owning
User field to be used for the report.

Now to get the Full Name of the system user for Owning User, expand that column, and select Full Name as the value to be displayed as shown below.

Click on Close and Apply to apply the changes to the query and to go back to the main editor.

Back in the main editor, we can see the fields added.

Now from the Visualizations section pick any of chart type.

Here we have picked a Stacked Bar Chart to start with. We can drag the fields and specify Area, Legend, and Value and also use the Filters section to generate the report as shown below.

The report after adding the fields à

Similarly, we can add our filter in the FILTER section to filter the records further as shown below

We can also add multiple charts in the report by selecting it from the Visualizations section.

For e.g. here we have used a Clustered Column chart to see all the leads based on Owner and Created On Date.

This completes the creation of simple reports which uses Dynamics 365 Online as Data Source.

In the next post, we’d publish this report to Power BI Service and display it within Dynamics 365 CE.

https://nishantrana.me/2018/08/20/power-bi-with-dynamics-365-ce-publishing-power-bi-report-to-the-web/

Hope it helps..

Maximum File Size Exceeded while using Export to Excel in Dynamics 365 CE

We got this error while trying to export around 70K data through export to excel in Dynamics 365 CE.

Log file gave us detail of the error i.e. Excel file exceeded size lime of 4 MB.

One workaround is to export small set of data (page wise) by applying some order criteria (either in the Grid or through Advanced Find)

Or better use the wonderful Export to Excel tool in XrmToolBox

https://dreamingincrm.com/2015/05/30/new-xrmtoolbox-plugin-export-to-excel/

It took few mins to export the records in excel and the file size was close to 19 MB.

Hope it helps..

Thirty two “Microsoft’s Very Passionate” professionals thanked with giant “WALL-OF-LOVE” at Microsoft Summit!!

Happy to see my pic there. Thanks to Peter Laker and Microsoft’s Face API .

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/thirty-two-microsofts-very-passionate-professionals-thanked-laker/

(one more reason to smile often 🙂 )

User Security Manager – My first XrmToolBox Plugin

Being one of the biggest fan and the most frequent daily user of XrmToolBox, always had this wish to write a plugin for it.

Thanks to Prashant Maurya (a dear friend and ex-Microsoft Employee) for making this wish come true. (Who played the major role in developing it).

The tool is called – User Security Manager.

The Plugin make it easy for the administrators to manage all the security related aspects of the system users. The tool also gives 360-degree information of the user in correspondence to business unit, security roles and teams.

In our current project we had around 180 users using the system divided into more than 50 business units, which involved frequent update of their business unit, changes in the security roles assigned, update in team assignment and also during testing we had to assign the same BU and roles to the test users in the org, which wasn’t that easy to do from the user interface.

So, the idea was to come up with a tool that will let an administrator to

View all the security roles that assigned to the user either directly or through the team that the user is member of.
View all the Teams the selected user is part of.
With just a single click, remove all the security roles assigned to the user.
With just a single click, remove user from all the teams that he is part of.
Easily assign and unassign single or multiple security role to the user.
Easily add or remove user from a single or multiple team.
Change the Business Unit of the user.

User Guide: –

Load all the users

After connecting to the organization, we can click on Load Users to load all the system users of the organization.

List details of the user selected

For the selected user, in User Detail Tab’s General section, we can get the general information of the user like First Name, Last Name, Title, Primary Email and Access Mode.
Next to the General section, we can see all the security roles assigned to the user either directly or through the teams the user is member of.
The Roles tab shows all the Roles assigned to the user and also the roles that are available in the business unit to which user belongs in Assigned and Available section along with their counts.
The Teams tab shows all the teams user is member of and also the teams that are available in the organization in Assigned and Available section along with their counts.

Remove all security roles of the user.

To remove all the security roles of the user, click on Remove All Roles button.

Remove user from all teams.

To remove the user from all the teams, click on Remove All Teams button.

Assign Security role to the user.

To assign security role to the user, check the security roles from the available security roles section and click on “<<” button.

To remove security role from the user.

To remove security roles from the user, select the roles from the Assigned section and click on “>>” button.

Assign User to Team(s).

To assign user to team(s), select the teams from the available section and click on “<<” button.

Remove user from Team(s)

To remove user from Team(s), select the team from the Assigned Section and click on “>>” button.

Change the business unit of the user.

To change the business unit of the user, select the Business Unit from the Business Unit drop down in General Section of User Details.

Please install it, use it and share your feedback which would help us to improve it

https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/releases/

Hope it helps..

When does the Plugin registered on SetState message fires in Dynamics 365?

Hi,

Recently we were writing a plugin that should fire when a record is activated.

In this kind of scenario, it is suggested\recommended to register plugin in both SetState and SetStateDynamicEntity message.

https://community.dynamics.com/crm/f/117/t/184070

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/crm/2008/03/07/developing-plug-ins-for-crm-4-0/

Interestingly we had the following observations

The Plugin fires only for SetStateDynamicEntity message.
The Plugin fires even if the SetState message step is disabled or not registered.
Only SetStateDynamicEntity message is fired when the record is Activated or Deactivated. For incident entity also, it was the only message fired on Reactivating the record. The plugin didn’t trigger in case of Resolve or Cancel Case.
Only SetStateDynamicEntity message is fired, even if we are updating the state of the record using SetStateRequest of SDK.
As SetStateRequest message is deprecated, if we use UpdateRequest to update the state of the record, the plugin that is registered on SetState and SetStateDynamicEntity will not fire. It will trigger only if registered for Update message.